Serbian Student Ticket, the Most Wonderful Student Movement in the Galaxy, “three steps ahead of their counterparts in France,” as the foreign press puts it, continues its campaign, proudly displaying its giant anti-corruption crosses in an attempt to chase away as many voters as possible.
Non-nationalist Serbian netizens often say that they would vote for the joint Albanian minority list if not for the pro-EU centrist coalition, and there’s a good reason for that – Mr. Kamberi’s platform aligns better with their values than the Students or some elements of the “European Serbia” group. The Albanian parties announced that they will participate jointly in the Serbian elections after meeting with the Kosovo PM Albin Kurti. The minority parties do not have to cross the 3 percent vote threshold to win seats.
The other notable minority parties in Serbia that will definitely also enter parliament are the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians (which kept close ties with Viktor Orban’s party until his defeat), and perhaps all three of the Bosniak parties from the Sandžak region will be represented.
This post-election mathematics complicates the fantasies of the Student Ticket, who are doing the Schrödinger’s cat fight thing again – they both already won and lost at the same time. It is hard to gauge the election results, because the polling results are, mildly put, unreliable.
The ones released by the government camp are naturally not to be trusted, because that part of the Serbian political class has done nothing but lie ever since the 1980s. Their chief opponents, however, who promise “change,” employ the same tactics and have tried to manufacture consensus about a referendum atmosphere – either Vučić’s kakistocracy or the 50-year-old “students”. “Serbia or mafia!” is how one of their slogans goes. So the Student-aligned media and consulting produced polling results that show only the ruling Progressives and the Student Ticket, and the supposedly undecided percentages.
The CRTA research made in June of this year, for example, about the attitudes of Serbian citizens tells us in one section that “Political preferences strongly shape attitudes towards the preferred direction of foreign policy“, where it only took into account the attitudes of the ruling party supporters and the Student supporters, while also having the categories of “Undecided” and “Abstainers”. No other political affiliations seem to exist to be asked about their preferences in which direction the government should steer the country or what they feel about current issues, despite the fact that the same research claims that “among decided voters (70 percent), 44.9 percent would currently vote for the Student List, 35.7 percent for SNS and 3.8 percent for the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). No other political actor independently clears the electoral threshold.“, so they could have gone the extra mile and listed their answers.
When it comes to what we call here the “student witnesses”, the wide group of Student ticket supporters, every other non-government option is considered illegitimate – the pro-EU coalition “secretly works for Vučić”, the minorities are “foreign implants on the Serbian body and secessionists”, and the Authentic Right alt-right coalition and the Socialist Party of Serbia are off limits to verbal attacks because of the shared ideology and the fact that the hyper-conformist and transactional crowd doesn’t want to offend their acquittances and family members amongst them – they mind need to call in a personal favor, or lend money or whatever. So no need to tear the social fabric over it.
The Student Ticket and their media allies are already welcoming to the ruling party members who “repent”, claiming that they are now “clean as washed in Ostrog (a popular monastery)”. Student List officials publicly “recognize” the “fact that there are many quality people in the ruling SNS and SPS”.
Judging by the vibes and the vox populi, though, here’s my educated guess – Vučić’s coalition will win the elections, but the mystery remains how big of a debacle the Student Ticket will be. Will they go into a well-deserved obscurity like their anti-political predecessors such as “Enough is enough” sovereigntist loon protest party, the cleronazi “Dveri” movement, and the Ljubiša Preletačević Beli media circus trolls, just to name a few? Pretty much all the people who supported those three are now crammed into the Student Ticket, along with the anti-lithium degenerates, which didn’t create a wide, inclusive, catch-all unified front – it created a mirror image of the ruling party and their satellites, further fueling the local Serbian and Balkan cynicism that Serbian society cannot and will not change for the better.
